Every step of his 28-year career has involved the iconic spaceship, including a stint as launch director, the person who decides if conditions are right for shuttle to fly.

He has some stiff competition, though, in hisWilliamsburg home.

Lesa Roe, director of Langley Research Center in Hampton, spent years overseeing the payloads that shuttles carried into space, a list that includes the Hubble telescope and parts of the International Space Station. Ralph is Lesa's husband.

The Roes, who moved to Hampton Roads in 2003, are among a generation of NASA civil service workers and contractors whose careers have spanned the shuttle program. So it's somewhat bittersweet, both said in separate interviews last week, to see Atlantis readied for the program's 135th and final launch — scheduled for Friday in Cape Canaveral, Fla.

"It was a great time," Lesa Roe said of her 16 years working in the program.

Ralph Roe, who leads the Langley-based NASA Engineering and Safety Center, joined NASA out of college in 1983. An engineer, he worked at Kennedy Space Center helping to ensure the rockets that shuttles use in orbit worked properly.

He was being trained in Kennedy's mission control room on Jan. 28, 1986, the day Challenger exploded over the Atlantic Ocean, killing all seven astronauts onboard.

Lesa Roe joined Kennedy a year later as a radio frequency communications engineer. She helped make sure that astronauts aboard the shuttles could communicate with the control room.

Both steadily advanced in the high-pressure work environment during the 1990s, shuttle program's most prolific and safest decade. It included 64 successful launches, four of which had Ralph Roe at the helm.

A highlight of this time, he said, was the Oct. 28, 1998, launch of Discovery. The reason: John Glenn, one of the original seven astronauts that trained at Langley during the 1960s, returned to space at the age of 77.

"It's probably one of the better jobs in NASA," Ralph Roe said of being launch director.

The Roes went to Johnson Space Center in Houston, where NASA's human spaceflight program is managed, in 1999. Lesa Roe oversaw the space station's payloads, making decisions on what the shuttle would carry into space.

Ralph Roe managed the shuttle's Vehicle Engineering Office, where he was responsible for the fleet of orbiters — the part of the shuttle that looks like an airplane.

The stint was short-lived and punctuated by the Columbia disaster in 2003. Ralph Roe was one of several high-ranking NASA officials faulted by investigators who concluded that managers of the shuttle program had become too lax.

"Both accidents were devastating to the whole team," he said. "Your friends and colleagues were onboard."

In the aftermath of Columbia, the Roes were asked to work at Langley by Roy Bridges, Langley's then-director who worked with the couple at Kennedy.

As she has at other NASA facilities, Lesa Roe quickly climbed the ladder at Langley. She was named center director in 2005, a post she has held since. She no longer works on the shuttle.

While located at Langley, the safety center led by Ralph Roe is under the jurisdiction of NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C. He leads a team of 60 engineers who have tackled everything from shuttle safety issues to rescuing the Chilean miners who were trapped underground last year.

Still active in the shuttle program, he will be in Cape Canaveral's control room Friday.

"I've been involved in every launch since (the sixth)," he said.

The series

The final launch of NASA's Space Shuttle program is scheduled for Friday. NASA Langley Research Center was involved from the start 40 years ago until today.